


Limits

by NightShadeQueen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Child Abuse, Computers and Computing, Depression, Gen, Mathematics, Muggle Technology, Physics, the intersection between the magical and muggle worlds
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-06 09:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15192155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightShadeQueen/pseuds/NightShadeQueen
Summary: Safety is knowing what your enemy can't do. Which is why Petunia's never felt so helpless, magicless and caught up in a world where magic can seemingly do anything. OR: Petunia Evans Dursley, from her own point of view.





	Limits

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the characters might seem a bit...off, because I'm writing them the way Petunia would see them. So Harry will appear to be more of a brat, Lily more annoying, Vernon more dependable, etc. Petunia is not meant to be a reliable narrator here. In particular, she will try to justify and downplay her abuse of Harry, because I don’t think Petunia thinks of herself as an abuser. She's going to be self-serving; she's going to twist events to suit her own interpretation. This is not meant to justify or defend child abuse; it's more that I don't see Petunia as a particularly self-aware person.
> 
> Mostly canon-compliant, but, uh, only sort of with Pottermore. (Also, I've apparently managed to misremember Grunnings as a company that makes drills for mining or oil extraction, and as far as I know no canon contradicts me, so I'm running with that.)
> 
> Also, uh, I mostly planned out this story before looking up the dates to when certain things became common, so I apologize for fudging dates a bit. Incidentally, Dijkstra's a lot older than I thought it was. It's from _1956_. And AES (2001) postdates PGP (1991). 
> 
> There's a lot of references to various bits of physics, computing, and cryptography I've thrown in without, well, actually explaining, because a) no one wants to read a fic that's 90% equations (and the people who do already know this stuff better than I can ever explain), b) it'd take me thousands of words to get to the point and I already have enough trouble doing that and c) no MathJax. Instead, I'm just going to point at one very good essay: [Graeme's _Understanding Public Key Cryptography with Paint_](http://maths.straylight.co.uk/archives/108). Well worth reading. (It's actually what gave me the inspiration for this fic in the first place. Well, that and the realization that Harry Potter magic would really be quite terrifying if it existed.)
> 
>  **Warnings:** Child abuse. Pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion are mentioned but not in detail. Depression.

_“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”_ \- Albert Camus

* * *

_Let's say Alice wants to send a message to Bob, but Charlie wants to listen in..._

The first time Petunia got caught passing notes in class, her teacher read the note out loud. It wasn’t a particularly embarrassing note, in hindsight, but at that time she was eight and eight-year-olds are easy to embarrass, especially since she'd been passing a note to a male classmate, arranging to meet after school. Her schoolmates spent the next four days singing “Petunia and Johnny, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G” before getting distracted by something else.

The second time, it was about six weeks later and the note is in cypher. Rot13. A relatively weak simple substitution cypher, yes, but it still got her sent to the principal's office, where she was forced to decode the message and the principal called her parents because it's the second time she's disrupted class. And no one, not her parents, not Lily, not her schoolmates, believed she's more interested in Johnny's maths books than Johnny himself, because she's a girl and girls aren't supposed to be interested in real-world things. So she got teased about it, by her parents, by her schoolmates, even sometimes by Lily, but she weathered that and Johnny's still nice to her and lets her borrow the books. Which Lily later borrowed from her.

Petunia liked learning what the limits of the world are. Because safety is knowing what things _can't_ do. Safety is knowing that cars can't teleport and if she doesn't see a car now, she can cross the road safely because one won't randomly appear in the middle of the street. Safety is knowing that bacteria _can't_ survive the process known as pasteurization and although she's not quite sure what that entails, well, bacteria can't survive it and so pasteurized milk is safe to drink. And Johnny's books contain new limits, new limits the world obeys _right now_ and hopefully will always obey.

That's the way maths is. Solid, dependable rules. Some things you can do, some things you can't, but everything's always so black and white, so obviously beautifully logical. One plus one was always two, adding together the angles of a triangle got you 180 if the triangle was on a flat surface, square matrices could only be inverted if their determinant wasn't zero.

That's the way physics is. Matter is conserved – you can't just make things _appear_ out of nowhere. Momentum is conserved. Electric charge is conserved. And nothing – nothing! – can move faster than the speed of light.

Johnny's dad worked with these newfangled things she didn’t understand. Computers, that's what they're called (although she thought that “computer” was a profession and not an object), and it's apparently super important to know how fast they can do things. He's told her, very very seriously, that it was impossible to sort things in faster than _en log en_ time, whatever that meant, and she had nodded in relief. Even this mysterious new world worked with rules.

Pity not all worlds worked like this.

* * *

The first time Lily jumped off the park swing and hovered in midair, Petunia nearly insisted on being dragged to the nearest mental hospital. You just _can't_ do that. You just can't lose all your momentum like that, ignore gravity like that.

But apparently Lily can. And, more importantly, Petunia _can't_.

She wrote to Dumbledore, desperately hoping that she too could break the rules. But, no. She can't.

And she's _terrified_. Because suddenly the world doesn't work the way she expects it to, and _anything can happen_. Her parents were apparently incapable of comprehending this, and it would be years before Petunia could explain this terror effectively.

You see, you can't factor large semiprimes. Well, at least you can't factor large semiprimes right now. But if you could – oh dear – the entirety of the world would fall apart, its secrets visible for everyone to see. And there will come a day when we can factor large semiprimes, and upon that day, we must find something else to stake our security on.

But magic, magic can factor large semiprimes. Magic can break encryption. Magic has access to every bank, every government, every nuclear silo. Magic has no boundaries, no limits. Magic could bring the banking system to its knees, blackmail every government with their own secrets, and destroy the world.

* * *

Sometimes, Petunia wondered how you'd kill someone with magic.

You probably could. There didn't seem to be any discernible rules.

* * *

Lily could fly using a broomstick, generating lift from who knows what. She could heat tea in a way that probably broke conservation of energy. She could turn teacups into mice just by speaking a few words in broken Latin and waving her wand around. Petunia didn’t even know how many laws of physics that one broke.

Then again, physics would probably have a heart attack if it went to Hogwarts. Possibly because fluid dynamics wouldn't work there either.

* * *

Could you kill someone with magic by forcing the blood out of their coronary arteries?

* * *

Every autumn, Lily went to Hogwarts, and Petunia returned to her normal, increasingly boring school, where she learned about things like Pasteur's pasteurization experiment and Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion. She had few friends, and she knew her looks did her no favours, but sometimes when she's lonely she practised being charming.

Not that she's good at that. Certainly, she's nowhere close to being as charming as Lily, who always seems to make friends quickly. But eventually Petunia did make a few friends herself, in the form of Johnny and later Dana, and they often studied together, borrowing book after book from Johnny's dad, and Lily wasn't around to borrow books anymore.

There is beauty and elegance in maths, a cold pure perfect symmetry. And for each symmetry, there is a conserved quantity. According to Noether's Law, at least.

For ten months out of a year, Petunia occupied this beautiful, elegant world. It's not exactly a place where you'd expect to find a woman, but her parents don't mind. “You have a gift,” her mother said often. “A gift far too valuable to waste.”

This was how her parents are, she knows. To them, both of their daughters were entirely perfect, no matter what. Even if one of them was a witch. And one can’t be.

* * *

Take a pencil, stand it up on its point. It’s symmetric. But it will spontaneously fall, breaking that symmetry. The thing about physics is that symmetry makes things easier. Breaking that symmetry makes things interesting. And Petunia, Johnny, and Dana had a nice symmetry going.

When did it break?

* * *

Could you use magic to rip someone to pieces, from a distance? Could you set someone on fire without even setting eyes on him or her? Could you kill someone you've never met?

Can you defend yourself from magic if you have none of your own?

* * *

Every summer, Lily returned, but she didn’t speak to Petunia anymore. She spent all her time talking to the boy down the street, the one with greasy hair, the one everyone was afraid of. The one named Snape. Petunia knew that he's also magical and therefore also terrifying.

It didn’t help that Petunia managed to overhear Snape tell Lily about Azkaban, the wizarding prison, where monsters roamed and stole your soul.

* * *

Magic is not beautiful. Magic is chaotic, a nonsensical mess of empirical observations with no unifying symmetry.

Magic is terrifying. Thus, Lily is terrifying.

Oh, why could no one else see this?

* * *

When Dana asked where Lily goes every year, Petunia just stammered something about boarding school. Dana just nodded as if she doesn't believe Petunia, and Petunia changed the subject. Dana's gotten obsessed with perfect randomness lately, always going on and on about the various algorithms and their pros and cons, and it's easy to change the subject to _that_.

By the time Johnny got around to asking about Lily, Petunia's gotten better at lying. “Lily goes to a boarding school,” she said, letting the tone of her voice imply that said boarding school was of the type for crazies or dullards. Or behaviorally challenged children.

Johnny raised an eyebrow but asked no more questions. Petunia expected rumours to fly, but they don't. She has good friends.

* * *

Dana disappeared for a few months during sixth form, and when she comes back, she's thinner, paler than a sheet, but _different_. Relentlessly cheerful, as if she had misplaced every other emotion.

“Where were you?” Petunia asked.

“Finding my invincible summer,” Dana replied as if that answered the question.

* * *

Was this when the symmetry broke? Dana and Johnny, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S. I.  N.   G.

* * *

Using magic, could you pinch someone's brain stem? That's probably fatal. Isn't it?

Then again, using magic, you could apparently steal someone's soul, however that worked.

Would that make their corpse lighter? Did souls have mass? Were souls made from the same protons, neutrons, and electrons matter was made of, or were souls made from some new particle that normal people could not see, could not detect?

* * *

What made magic people magical, anyway? What made Petunia so un-magical, so boring, so plain?

* * *

Lily got married and stayed in the magical world. Petunia, to no one's surprise, went off to university. She shared a room with Dana, in a tiny apartment with four other girls, and they studied maths; they kept their room full of books and papers and chalkboards covered with equations that more resembled a mess of Greek letters than anything else. Johnny went to Cambridge, which was far enough away that they fell out of touch, as none of them could afford a landline.

Petunia had never had a boyfriend before, never had a kiss, never even had a boy even be remotely interested in her in a romantic way. She's never been pretty or charming the way Lily is. And Dana was far too busy to date, and unfortunately, two single young women living together, neither with a boyfriend or even an apparent interest in boys…well, rumours spread quickly.

Dana seemed utterly oblivious to the rumours, holed up as she was in her own internal invincible summer, relentlessly cheerful and optimistic and still entirely too willing to talk your ear off over, say, one-time pads, hash collisions, or Alan Turing.

But Petunia, Petunia cared. She always has. It's her greatest weakness, and the more she practised being charming, the more she knew that people are chaotic, a nonsensical mess of empirical observations with no unifying symmetry. She floated among her classmates, never sure about where she stood, except…

“ _You have a gift. A gift far too valuable to waste.”_ And it was slipping out of her hands.

The winter days got shorter.

London got foggier and more miserable. Petunia's grades, already a step down from what they were in secondary school, got worse. She's always been smart, except now she's not sure. Maths have always come easily to her, the symmetries obvious, but now it seemed to blend together, a mess of characters from every alphabet. She felt like she’s down at the bottom of a well; she felt like she’s drowning in fog; she cannot find summer.

The rumours don't sing anymore, but if they did: “Petunia and Dana, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”

No, the rumors were meaner now.

* * *

Could you force someone else to fall in love with you with magic? Could you use magic to turn a no into an eager, enthusiastic yes? Could you use magic to bring joy or take it away?

* * *

She saw the scars on Dana’s abdomen, and from there it didn’t take much to figure out what happened. Dana had gotten pregnant, lost the child, failed to expel it properly, and nearly died of sepsis before a surgical team removed it. Petunia wondered who the father was.

She wondered if magic could have changed the outcome.

* * *

Christmas brought dreary snow. Not the pretty white type in Christmas cards, but the unfortunate grey type that'd been trodden on far too many times. And for the first time in years, Christmas brought Lily, accompanied by her husband, James. A family reunited for Christmas dinner, now with a plus one.

James Potter was a well-tanned, dark-haired young man. He reminded Petunia somewhat of Severus Snape, except for the fact that Potter was quite loud and boisterous, while Snape had been far more withdrawn unless he was showing Lily something magical. Petunia definitely liked Potter more than Snape, but not by much. Potter was friendlier. He was, however, a wizard, and thus not to be trusted.

For Christmas dinner, they had turkey with cranberry stuffing. Her Mum's speciality. Petunia usually loved it, but this year it tasted like cardboard to her.

Both Potter and Lily looked tired; dark circles under their eyes. Lily looked thinner. Even at Christmas, they carried their wands openly, on holsters on their forearms, something Lily had never done before. Even at Christmas, they wore glum, guarded expressions.

Even at Christmas, they answered every question with half-truths and outright lies.

To be fair, so did Petunia.

It would take several years before Petunia learned about Lord Voldemort, his hatred of all things Muggle-related, and a certain Wizarding War that had just broke out. Perhaps this was for better; instead of worrying about the myriad of ways a Wizarding War could have fucked over normal people, she could worry about her increasingly-worse grades, how lost she felt, no longer capable of comprehending her classes, of learning new material, of understanding the subtle social rules that governed the use of the kitchen in her shared apartment.

She returned to uni feeling worse than ever.

* * *

The days should be getting longer, but Petunia could not feel it. Dana’s incessant cheer became grating, and Petunia found herself wondering if Dana ever grieved for the baby she lost. How heartless must she be, to ignore a death, to spurn the father.

* * *

One day, Petunia overslept a class. She woke up with half the day gone and a cup of tea at her bedside. Dana photocopied her notes for her.

A week later, Petunia overslept another class. And then, a few days after that, another. Soon she was missing more classes than she’s attending. She was going to have a difficult time maintaining good enough grades to pass this term, and for some reason, she didn’t care.

She slept. She pushed Dana away, taunting her about the child she lost.

Time slowed down. The days blended into each other, getting longer, but not fast enough. She was exhausted, unhappy, dragging her tired body forward, day by day by day. She did not have a word for this, then, but now she does.

Depression.

* * *

Could magic erase your memories, change them, made you forget everyone you’ve ever cared for?

* * *

At the end of term, she left, not intending to return. She returned home to Cokeworth. Her father helped her get a secretarial job in London, at a place called Grunnings. She took the train out each workday morning, returned home to live with her parents every evening, eating the food her mother cooked, sleeping in her childhood bed. She was still sleeping a lot, but the days are long and bright which helped take the edge off.

Her parents loved her, and she was ashamed of how she’s squandered their love, their care, her gifts. Quite often she sobs herself to sleep. She felt aimless, drifting through time, her brain not quite in gear. The only good thing was that Lily isn’t around – she’s wrapped up in the world of magic. Petunia already felt inadequate enough; she doesn’t need to compare herself to her magical sister. Her beautiful, successful, _married_ magical sister and Petunia had none of that. She was painfully aware of her own inadequacies, her _limits_ , the things she cannot do. She was terrible at making small talk, meeting new people, and one day with sudden clarity she realized she has no friends anymore. She’s now officially loveless, friendless, and career-less, like the stereotypical cat lady except she also hated cats, and she woke up one morning utterly terrified that her life was going to end up going on like this, day after identical day, exhausted, drained, unhappy. She barely noticed the seasons changing.

She didn’t notice that one of the junior executives at Grunnings was interested in her until he asked her out one March morning. The trees were just being to sprout leaves, the snow had just melted, the birds were just returning, and Vernon Dursley asked Petunia Evans out.

They went to a restaurant, and he talked about himself, and she didn’t have to speak at all. Then they took a walk, and he told her how the world should be: neat, orderly, and sensible, with everything in its proper place, behaving the way it should. She decided she liked that, the safe sensibility of normal life that followed the rules it should.

* * *

From what she understood, Johnny and Dana are together now. Neither are speaking to her anymore. Their symmetry was shattered.

* * *

Sometimes, Petunia wondered what it would be like if she had magic. She was desperate to clear the fog, to find some way out of winter, to recover the part of her mind which used to be able to love, to find joy, to understand, to comprehend, to learn. If she was magical, could she wave a wand and go back to a time when she was okay?

Could Lily, if she would ever fucking visit, wave her wand and restore Petunia?

* * *

Sometimes, Petunia wondered how Dana managed to find summer. Sometimes, she wished she had Dana’s strength. But Petunia’s not Dana, and she knew that there were some things she just couldn’t do.

* * *

She told herself that she loves Vernon. She certainly felt safe around him. He’s wonderfully ordinary. Not magical. Nice and wholesome. Not the type to pressure a girl into sex, the way the young men her age can be like.

Petunia had never dated before. Vernon’s her first kiss, the first man she allowed to touch her. Petunia didn’t quite know the rules, how things work, and typically that would have worried her but Vernon was just so nice. Sensible. Square. Symmetric. When she told him about Lily, about magic, about her fears, he held her and told her that he’ll protect her from all of that. Intellectually, she knew he couldn’t, but the words were nice.

The diamond he bought her was sensible, square, and symmetric. She moved from Cokeworth to Surrey, from her childhood bed to the bed of her new husband. It took her a while to be able to cook for him properly. She’d never cooked before. They took the train out to London each workday morning together; she returned home earlier than he did to start dinner. She began to wake up again in the routine of daily life, finding joy in organizing his files just so, making him the perfect roast (Maillard reactions, she thinks, are lovely). She can do this, she thought. She can be a housewife, a woman, living in a world that’s just as beautiful as mathematics. During the day, she’s Vernon’s secretary. During the night, she’s his wife.

It’s not that hard, being a secretary. People knew how to interact with a secretary, so she knew how to interact with them and for the first time, she understood the hidden rules of society. Petunia developed her phone voice, sweet and gentle and professional. She learns how to draft a memo. Sometimes Vernon let her help out with the accounting, and while she griped a little in her head about the odd representations of negative numbers, this is maths she understood. Things make sense. People behave the way she expected them to. Numbers behave the way she expects. No surprises anywhere, and _it's wonderful_.

It’s not that hard, being his wife. Vernon was gentle with her, always appreciative of her efforts, willing to laugh off the occasional ruined dinner and phone for takeout. She doesn’t really like Marge, Vernon’s sister (and her noisy incomprehensible dogs), but that’s okay.

Away from Cokeworth, she began to forget. She still saw the laws of physics all around her, and she took joy from seeing things behave the way they should, momentum conserved, mass conserved, from the way the train arrived to at the station on time every day (a feat of modern engineering, she thought) to the utter wonder that was the water and electric systems. She lived in a beautiful house, and she took joy in making things as beautiful as they should be. She didn’t see Lily or Snape or Potter anymore, and everything was so blessedly normal. She had some distance from the world where nothing made sense, and for the first time in years, she felt like she could be safe, could live in an understandable world, among the billions of people who never knew about magic. Magic had to be subtle, didn’t it, if so many people could go around and never know about it. There must be places it did not touch.

When she got a Christmas card from Johnny, she cheerfully tossed it in the trash, ignoring the fact that the picture had also included Dana. Those two can soar together with their unclipped wings, losing themselves in the ethereal world of maths; she has her own beautiful sphere now, here on earth, in her home.

When she fell pregnant, she’s happy about it. Her parents were happy about it. Vernon was happy about it.

* * *

Lily upstaged her.

Petunia’s pregnancy was easy, routine, uncomplicated. Lily, who got pregnant a month after Petunia did, was apparently in some sort of mortal danger and could not come to visit, not even by poking her head in the fireplace. Mum and Dad were beside themselves with worry, although Petunia reckoned that witches probably had some ability to magic infants out of themselves, avoiding the whole big-head-small-birth-channel thing, because if she had magic that’s the first thing she’d figure out how to do, throw off the constraints of bipedalism and large brains and skip the painful-looking delivery process.

This didn’t change the fact that Lily gets all the parental attention. And while Petunia has always been envious of her sister, this is the worst. They worry over Lily, who they can’t visit; they ignore Petunia, who’s _right here, goddammit!_

Petunia got larger. All parts of her body felt swollen, slower. The fog in her brain returned, doubled. She quit her job, rolled herself into the soft caress of home. Vernon took care of her. He brought her chocolate and scoured London for the right takeout; he took over all the chores. Petunia had never thought she’d be pregnant so young, but on the odd days she envisioned it, she hadn’t thought she would be so passive. She’d imagined herself with a baby on one arm, neatly dressed and hatted, standing at a chalkboard, a working mother, still slender and beautiful like the ads in the magazines. Instead, she can’t even fit into her shoes.

She bought fascinators by the dozen; through catalogues she purchased outfit after outfit that she couldn’t fit into. She had Vernon repaint the baby’s room. Twice. She swore, over and over again, to bloody _stop eating crap_ but her body wasn’t having any of that.

And again, she slept.

She felt like an incubator, a mindless thing that existed only to turn food into...a child? Vernon’s child. This thing that hijacked her body and mind and soul and there were many days when she wanted nothing more than to not be pregnant anymore.

Weren’t women supposed to want this? Petunia couldn’t help but feel like she wasn’t entirely doing this being-a-woman thing properly. But that was it, wasn’t it? She could pretend to do what women did, go through the motions of being female, but in her heart of hearts, she knew that this role wasn’t the one she wanted to play.

Pity she wasn’t capable of playing the other.

* * *

When Petunia went to hospital to deliver, her labour induced a week after her official due date, her parents weren’t there. Something to do with Lily. Petunia was in an anaesthesia-induced haze the whole time; it took fourteen hours and ended in a Caesarean section, but as Petunia held her son, she felt that her life should finally be complete. She had a husband and a son. What more could any woman want? What more could _she_ want?

Vernon named the baby Dudley.

* * *

Petunia dreamt of Vernon, of welcoming him home with dinner made and the house neat, their kids playing quietly near the fireplace. She takes his briefcase and his jacket and hands him a glass of brandy. He hugs her and then his face slides off and Severus Snape smirks at her. “Isn’t magic grand? You can be whomever you want to be,” he hisses at her, and then Petunia woke up screaming.

Magic, she decided, meant that you could not trust your own eyes, could not reliably identify anyone.

Magic could let you become _anyone_ you wanted to be.

That thought is utterly terrifying.

* * *

There are two families. One is magical, one is normal. Each has a son, born about a month apart. They are symmetric. They do not intersect. Things are easy.

They live in separate worlds now, Lily and her. Petunia's no longer talking to her sister at all. Her world narrowed to just her home, her child, her husband.

* * *

Petunia did not know how to be a mother.

Her own mother may have been absent during Petunia's pregnancy and delivery, but she was here for Petunia afterwards, when Petunia really needed her. Mum taught Petunia how to change a nappy, how to burp Dudley, how to rock him to sleep. She stayed through July, through July 31st, the day Lily gave birth, and because she could not go to Lily, she remained with Petunia.

Mum always came through. Petunia wondered how she did it, how she could deal with two daughters born a year apart, how she dealt with falling pregnant again when her first child was only three months old. And sometimes Petunia wondered about Lily, who almost certainly was alone with Potter and her child, holed up somewhere that no one could visit.

Dudley was a fussy child, always wanting to be fed, to be held, to be rocked. He wouldn’t sleep alone in his crib and cried at the slightest provocation. Petunia regularly fell asleep with Dudley still latched onto her breast.

Vernon made enough money that she didn’t have to go back to work, and she knew that he wouldn't mind if she became a stay-at-home mother. Petunia tried her best to keep the house clean, put dinner on the table before Vernon got home, but she failed more often than she succeeded, and Mum had to help her. The days bled into each other, all a haze of crying child and not enough sleep, until one day Petunia's mother didn’t show up.

* * *

They held a small funeral. Family only. Lily couldn’t make it, despite the fact that _it was her bloody fault_ that their parents were dead, because it was quite evident to Petunia that their parents were murdered by magic, no matter what the police said. Two healthy adults in their mid-fifties did not both suffer heart attacks at the same time. It was just simply utterly unlikely, and she vacillated between believing that the police were merely incompetent and believing that some magical person must have paid them off or used magic to alter their minds or something.

Petunia did know that her parents were almost certainly murdered by the same people who were hunting Lily and James Potter. Worse, because those people were magical, they were almost certainly beyond the reach of the police, beyond the reach of justice. Petunia knew that plenty of wizards and witches didn’t come from normal, non-magical families, and those witches and wizards didn’t have any sort of papers or presence in the normal world. Scotland Yard wouldn’t even know those people existed.

She was equal parts furious and terrified. Furious, because her parents were dead because of Lily, because Lily was a witch, because Lily had somehow ticked off some group of murderous bastards that, unhelpfully, had magic. And terrified, because if said group of murderous bastards would go after Petunia’s parents, there was nothing to stop them from going after Petunia. And being, well, normal, meant she had no defences against magic.

_She was defenseless against magic._

Something long buried within her rose and clicked into place. She might be defenceless, but she had no other choice but to play the weak hand she got to the best of her ability. She could not defend herself and her family against magic, but she would have to.

Somehow.

* * *

_In hindsight,_ Petunia thought, a few weeks later, _flowery declarations are easy to say, much harder to carry out_. She stared down at the positive pregnancy test in her hands, and she knew what her decision had to be. She remembered how utterly miserable and useless she was while pregnant with Dudley, and knew she could not afford to have another child so soon, not when her family needed her. She called around to a few clinics, took the earliest appointment she could find.

She didn't tell Vernon; she guessed he would not approve. For the first time, his rigidity felt more constricting than freeing. She lied to the neighbours – “I just need to be out of the house for a while” – and she took advantage of their pity in order to get them to watch Dudley for a while. She took the train into London, then hailed a cab to get to the clinic.

 _This is what birds do_ , she thought. Birds often would lay an extra egg to hedge their bets; they’d feed that chick only if food was plentiful. The embryo she was harbouring was that chick; there was just not enough of her to go around. She was not Dana with her infinite summer; she must be conservative with her time and energy.

Petunia expected some dirty, grungy place with cheap chairs and cheaper linoleum, but that was not the case. The clinic was perfectly respectably furnished, with reasonable-enough padded chairs, some with arms, some without. In the waiting room, it had the same carpet every office building had.

There was paperwork because there always was paperwork. Then a kind nurse took Petunia into the procedure room, and Petunia couldn’t stop herself from crying. The procedure didn't even take fifteen minutes.

* * *

When it was over, she hailed another cab and asked it to take her to Kensington Gardens. The cabbie, a kind-looking older man with white hair and an impressive pair of eyebrows, took one look at her tear-streaked face and said, “Oh, honey, things will be okay. You made the right choice, you’ll see.”

She wanted to tell him about Lily, about her suspicions about her parents’ deaths, about all the strange and unnatural things that had happened since Lily got that letter from Hogwarts. But she couldn’t; he would consider her insane if she told him, and she realized that she no longer had anyone she could talk to and be truthful with. Not Vernon, she’d already lied to him; not her parents, who were dead; not Lily, who was still in hiding, apparently; not the cabbie, who had no damn clue about the terrifying oddness and lawlessness that truly governed reality. There's always been a curtain between her and the rest of humanity, but now, it was absolute.

Petunia choked out something noncommittal for want of a better response, turned toward the window, and pointedly said nothing else until the cabbie dropped her off at the Gardens. She had no other defence other than rudeness.

She made sure to walk around for a while; this would be her cover story. She needed to look around, to remember enough details to sound convincing; she needed to learn how to lie.

No, strike the last part. She knew how to lie already.

* * *

By the time she returned home and collected Dudley, it was already getting late and Vernon was there, waiting for her with takeout. He took one look at her and informed her that they'd be attending the company party on Friday and he'd allow no argument. “Wear one of the new dresses you bought, I'll arrange for a babysitter,” he said, pushing a container of takeout chicken and a pair of cheap wooden chopsticks into her hands. She tried to protest – she had nothing to wear; she was still trying to lose the baby weight; she couldn't _possibly_ appear in public, in front of the wives of her former bosses, his co-workers.

Vernon didn't accept any of her protestations, so by Friday afternoon, Petunia found herself in front of a mirror in their bedroom, holding up dress after dress in front of herself. She needed something just formal enough without being too stuffy; just professional enough but not too professional that it looked inappropriate for a housewife. Before, as a secretary, she roughly knew how to dress for work – suit jacket, nice shirt, pencil skirt, low heels – but she’d never attended one of the company parties before and she had never been good at fashion the way Lily had been, never been good at this silent language of women. She felt silly, frivolous, standing there trying to match colours to her complexion as if she was the type of woman who did things like that.

Well, she guessed she was that type of woman now. She’d been the one to buy all these damned dresses, after all.

Finally, she decided on a nice, smart number in navy with matching pumps and a matching fascinator with netting and no lace. Holding her breath, she slowly unzipped the sheath dress and stepped into it. It fell loosely around her frame. She’d lost a lot more weight than she thought she had. She’d have to choose a different dress, one more draped, maybe silk instead of wool, a style she didn’t usually go for but would be more forgiving to fit. Her final choice was an empire-waist dress with a square neckline lower than she’d expected when she chose it from the catalogue. It was less structured, less fitted, less professional than what she would have liked, but there was nothing more structured that would fit. A pair of new sheer black stockings and her sensible navy heels did help matters a bit, as did her no-nonsense fascinator. Unfortunately, she couldn’t find a blazer that fit her, and she wasn't about to wear a shawl. She wasn't old yet; she didn't own one.

She dithered on whether or not to match her earrings to her necklace before finally deciding on a simple string of pearls Vernon had given her. By that time, they were running late and Vernon rushed her into his new company car, a sleek black Jaguar XJ-S. The engine roared to life before settling down into a low purr as Vernon backed out of the driveway.

She didn’t want to go anywhere. She wanted to stay home, with Dudley. She didn’t get a damn that she hadn’t been out but once since her parents’ funeral; she loathed the idea of having to face other people again. Other people who would almost certainly judge her, judge what she was wearing, judge her ability as a mother and a wife, and she didn’t think she could withstand that type of judgment. Not yet; perhaps not ever.

The party was held at some swanky hotel in London, a modern monstrosity of steel and glass, drenched with crystal chandeliers and grounded with what seemed like acres and acres of polished black granite. A bellhop directed them up an imposing set of stairs to an enormous banquet room that had high, arched ceilings decorated with abstract patterns in black and white tile. Long tables filled the room. The designer, whoever it was, loved bare filament bulbs and mirrors so the large banquet room almost seemed too bright, and there were more forks than Petunia knew how to deal with.

She was seated to Vernon’s right; across from her was an insipid-looking woman with dishwater-blonde hair and bright blue eyeshadow that tried but failed to brighten up her murky brown eyes. She had a nametag – where did she manage to get that nametag from? – which proclaimed that her name was Maggie. Next to her was a youngish-looking man wearing a shirt with a pattern that reminded Petunia of graph paper, and he had a bloody pocket protector as well. Compared to most other people, who were wearing full suits, he looked severely underdressed. His nametag read “William”.

On Petunia's right was a redheaded woman squeezed into a sheath dress at least two sizes too small. The dress pushed her generous tits almost up to her chin, her hair had two-inch roots, and her heels were quite high. At least her blazer appeared to fit, even if it had leather accents, and according to her nametag, her name was “Tiffany”.

Petunia didn’t think she should be on a first-name basis with any of these people, but the nametags seemed to be first names only, which didn’t bode well for the gathering, as it probably meant some nutcase American consulting company was behind the whole bloody thing and Americans had no taste in food or wine, and she assumed they’d have no ability to throw a party either. As if to punctuate this point, a waiter arrived with the bread, and it was the overly-sweet, fluffy rolls Americans liked for some blasted reason.

And unfortunately, Tiffany chose this moment to turn towards Petunia and exclaim, “Oh, it’s Mrs. Dursley! Vernon speaks of you often. How's being a new mother treated you?”

Vernon grabbed a roll and generously buttered it before popping it into his mouth, leaving Petunia to work her way towards some sort of socially-appropriate reply. “I...uh, yes, uh,” she said, stalling for time. “It’s been...good. Yeah. Uh. Good.” It’d been a long time since she’d had to make small talk in an office setting; she was out of practice. “Vernon’s been amazingly helpful, too.”

Tiffany laughed, a little too loudly for a work event. “Oh, you’re such a darling. I’d hazard a guess that he doesn’t do nearly enough for you, eh?” She took a drink of her wine. “Don’t suppose you’ve started missing the workplace, yet?”

Before Petunia could answer, Maggie interceded. “Oi, Tiffany, stop being such a nosy prat,” she warned. “One must not pester the boss’s wife, after all.”

Tiffany laughed at that, too. She had two spots of colour high up on her cheeks that might have been blusher or might have been an indication that she’d imbibed more of the wine than reasonable at a bloody _work outing_. “Oh, Maggie, don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. I was just teasing Vernon – ”

How was this woman on a first-name basis with her husband, anyway?

“ – and I really mean no harm.”

With a sigh, William redirected the conversation. “How was Trinidad, Tiffany?”

“Oh, it was _wonderful_! I – ”

Petunia tuned Tiffany out. She never really socialized with the other secretaries when she actually worked for Grunnings and she did not intend on starting now, and her tablemates seemed to be well engrossed in a conversation that excluded her, anyway. Instead, she turned her mind to the thing that’d been occupying it since her parents had been murdered – what to do about magic? She had no magic of her own and she could not tell too many people or the magical people would come after her. Lily had told her that – magical people were quite secretive. It was okay in the family, but if Petunia blabbed to the wrong person, the magical authorities would come and...do something. Lily had always been quite evasive on what the magical authorities would actually do, so Petunia had always assumed the worst: that they’d take her to Azkaban and take her soul.

So. Definitely never talking to anyone.

“ – and the waters were so clear, so blue – ”

On the other hand, they could leave the country. Go to...Trinidad, was it? The little of the conversation Petunia caught made it seem like quite a nice place, wherever it was. Except Petunia didn’t know if Trinidad also had witches and wizards, and she didn’t really think trying to start over in a land where she’d stick out like a sore thumb was really a good idea. In England, at least, she’d blend in, and she suspected that magical folk could track her to the end of the earth if they really wanted to. No, better to stay in a place she knew and just keep her head down.

And anyway, the school that Lily attended was in Scotland, wasn’t it?

Petunia’s thoughts got interrupted by the waiter, who was bearing plates of Steak Diane and fresh rolls. He set one plate in front of her, and Petunia glanced cautiously at the sauce-covered meat and the limp lettuce accompanying it. She looked at the forks available to her and tentatively picked up the middle one in order to poke at the steak. Bloody hell, the damned event was even serving Continental cuisine. Although it was, at the very least, cooked properly through.

“ – sounds like you’d definitely wouldn’t mind moving there,” Maggie was saying.

Tiffany drained her wineglass. “Oh, definitely not. I wonder who Corporate is going to – ”

From what Petunia had overheard between Lily and Snape, magical people did not like normal people much. Most stayed hidden from normal people; heck, she hadn’t even seen any magical folk, in her entire life, other than Potter, Snape, Dumbledore, and her own sister. Four people out of the entirety of the world.

She started to estimate the number of magical folk in Great Britain but quickly realized that she didn’t have enough information to make even a reasonable guess. Not enough to catch the attention of the government, unless the government was in on it, which was actually pretty likely. (Perhaps magical folk could alter memories? That seemed like something magic could do.) She knew that magical folk had a hidden street somewhere in the heart of London – Diagon Alley, that’s what it was called, wasn’t it, that place Lily visited before returning to school each fall – but she had no clue how much land magical folk could hide. She supposed she could go around looking for bits of land that’d seemingly gone missing…or perhaps she should wander around the outskirts of Diagon Alley with a compass to see if it responded, see if she could use a compass to detect other hidden magical spaces.

Petunia made a mental note to find a detailed map of London.

Then she mentally rolled her eyes at herself. She’d spent the last three weeks doing _nothing_ , just dithering over the smallest of details, trying to get her foggy, sleep-deprived mind to make some sort of decision like _should we move or not?_ She could promise herself that’d she’d look into things, see if she could find a way to detect magic, find a place to live free of magic, but she’d also promised herself that she’d somehow manage to pull herself together enough to pass Complex Analysis and that hadn’t happened either.

“ – You’re just upset you have to leave that basement cavern of yours.” William’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Frankly, I thought you’d be glad that all and sundry aren’t traipsing through your office asking to be moved to the top of the queue.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “I somewhat doubt everyone is lining up to learn a new flavour of assembly. We’re just going to end up having to run all over the place.”

“Hey, guess that’ll mean I’ll be seeing you more?” William asked hopefully.

Petunia looked over at Vernon, who seemed to be listening to the conversation with a look of paternal indulgence on his face. “How long do we have to stay?” she asked him.

“Dinner should be here, fairly soon?” he replied. “And there’ll be dancing afterwards, but we can leave before that.” But his crestfallen look told her quite clearly that he’d been hoping for at least a bit of dancing.

“I guess we could dance, a bit. When is the babysitter expecting us back?” With a start, Petunia realized that she hadn’t even thought about that detail; Vernon had handled _everything_ for this evening.

“Fairly late. Ten, eleven, somewhere around that.” Vernon checked his watch. “It’s about seven, now.”

Petunia hummed and took another bite of her food. The steak wasn’t actually half bad. “Been a while since Grunning’s done an event like this.”

Vernon harrumphed. “There’ve been others; this is just the first one I’ve managed to convince you to come to.” He leaned over, tucked an arm around her waist. “Figured you could do with some time out of the house.”

“Yeah,” she replied, leaning against him. But she felt more separate from him than ever; she could hear the question in his statement that she knew he would never ask her outright: was she planning on hiding in the house forever, drowning in her grief? She knew he didn’t expect her to return to work any time soon; not while Dudley was so young, at least, and they didn’t actually need the money she could bring in, but he hadn’t been in the market for a wife who would while away her days hidden away from the world. She had put her best foot forward while he was courting her; she knew perfectly well she’d have to put that mask on again for him. “So. Trinidad?” she asked, hoping to make it seem like she’d been at least listening to the conversation. “I didn’t realize Grunnings was putting a new office there. How many people are we planning on transferring? I can’t imagine we’re going through all this effort just to let some people work on a beach.”

Vernon looked at her carefully, brow furrowing. “I never told you, did I?”

“You might have; I probably forgot.” She affected a self-deprecating grin; her memory had been on the fritz lately.

“Well, British Petroleum’s looking into expanding, and they think there’s natural gas in the seas around Trinidad. So my uncle wanted me to set up a team, see if we can develop an undersea drilling platform that they’ll like.” He gestured at the rest of the table. “So I stole a few engineers from other departments. We’re just designing and prototyping now, but we’re going to have to test on site sooner or later.”

With a sinking heart, Petunia realized that she’d been reading the entire situation wrong. She quickly went through the entire conversation in her mind, hoping desperately that she hadn’t said anything too embarrassing, cursing her usual inability to understand social situations.

Vernon, utterly unaware of Petunia’s mortification, continued: “William’s one of my mechanical engineers. Tiffany’s our token geologist. Maggie works with the mainframe.”

It hit Petunia then that if she had not dropped out, she could have been working, like these other women, and the old familiar shame washed over her again. _“You have a gift. A gift far too valuable to waste,”_ her mother used to tell her, and those memories rose again through the exhausted fog her life had become. These women managed to break out of the prescribed role of women, and Petunia had failed at that.

She let Vernon take her home early, even before the waiters came around to serve dessert, hoping that she’d never have to see any of these people again. Only too late had she realized her social role – the wife of the boss – and just how badly she’d failed to act accordingly to it.

* * *

Petunia knew perfectly well that she couldn't allow herself to fall pregnant again. She didn't quite know how she'd accomplish that but she couldn't handle another pregnancy scare. An IUD could be an option, she guessed, but the whole Dalkon Shield debacle had made her wary of those. She didn’t even want to know what Vernon’s opinion of the pill would be; she couldn't imagine bringing up condoms with him either, she doubted that she could hide a diaphragm from him, and she didn’t want to trust the rhythm method given that she managed to conceive while still breastfeeding.

So the next time he asked, she claimed she had a headache. The time after that, she claimed she was too tired. Eventually, he stopped asking.

* * *

She made the damned mistake of giving Dudley ice cream one day, and for the next week, he just wouldn’t stop asking for it, throwing tantrum after tantrum when she refused. Eventually, she’d give up and give it to him, always.

Petunia knew she was coddling Dudley, spoiling him, but the constant tantrums and tears were always quickly too much for her, and the more she indulged him, the more uncontrollable he became, an accelerating pattern Petunia didn’t know how to get out of. He would throw food he didn’t want at her; he would scream and kick; she would feel like a failure of a mother. Without her own mother to guide her, Petunia felt utterly lost and helpless.

Sometimes, she wondered how Lily was doing, what type of mother Lily was. She couldn’t really imagine what the magical world would be like anymore. Floating mobiles? Auto-rocking cribs? Spells to reheat formula and bring it to her – Petunia had been forced to stop breastfeeding Dudley, her milk seemed to have randomly dried up and she couldn’t bring herself to find a doctor to figure out why. She suspected that this was yet another thing magic had cures for that normal people couldn't access.

Sometimes, she wondered what Dana would be like as a mother. Quiet, determined Dana with a baby on her hip in class, arranging for babysitters with the same cool efficiency that she’d used to enforce the cleaning schedule for the apartment they’d shared during Petunia’s short stint in uni. She could not imagine Dana ever getting an abortion.

Petunia also couldn’t imagine Lily bent over the bassinet at four in the morning, trying to sooth a sobbing…what was her and Potter’s child’s name, again? Harold? Harvey? No...it was Harry, wasn’t it? Something like that. Lily’d been in hiding since before she gave birth to her son, so Petunia hadn’t ever seen him; she had no clue what her nephew looked like, what temperament he had, and really, she didn’t care. She shouldn’t care. She and Lily occupied different, non-intersecting worlds, after all.

But still, sometimes while she hid at home she tried to imagine with Lily’s life must be like. What having magic would be like. Lily always used her magic rather carelessly: making flowers float, jumping off the swingset, changing the colour of Petunia’s favourite sweater. She’d never recognized the dangers of magic, and Petunia could easily imagine Lily using magic to clean annoying milk stains off her walls, charming a rattle to entertain her son, changing diapers with magic instead of her hands. She tried to imagine Lily dealing with a tantruming child and couldn't; perhaps there was magic that could end a tantrum? But she could not imagine Lily using a spell like that.

She could not imagine waking up one day to find Lily’s child on her doorstep, wrapped neatly in a blanket and holding a letter from Dumbledore, next to the morning's fresh milk.

She could not imagine this final symmetry shattering, magic crashing right back into her perfectly ordinary world.

* * *


End file.
